Yoga galloped even before the orchids appeared

[Apr 18, 2009 (title unknown) from enowning Terry Eagleton is keen on theology.
If Marxism once held out a promise of reconciling culture and civilization, it is partly because its founder was both a Romantic humanist and an heir of Enlightenment rationalism. Marxism is about culture and civilization together-sensuous particularity and universality, worker and citizen of the world, local allegiances and international solidarity, the free self-realization of flesh-and-blood individuals and a global cooperative commonwealth of them. But Marxism has suffered in our time a staggering political rebuff; and one of the places to which those radical impulses have migrated is-of all things-theology. In theology nowadays, one can find some of the most informed and animated discussions of Deleuze and Badiou, Foucault and feminism, Marx and Heidegger. That is not entirely surprising, since theology, however implausible many of its truth claims, is one of the most ambitious theoretical arenas left in an increasingly specialized world-one whose subject is nothing less than the nature and transcendental destiny of humanity itself. These are not issues easily raised in analytic philosophy or political science. Theology’s remoteness from pragmatic questions is an advantage in this respect.]

[Re: 100 Years of Sri Aurobindo on Evolution: The dialectics of biology and culture; science, ecology & economics (part 6 of 6)
by Tony Clifton on Fri 17 Apr 2009 07:50 PM PDT Profile Permanent Link
Since the article references certain symmetries of thinking about the relationship between society and science in Sri Aurobindo, Dialectical Biology and Marx. I'll post a bit of an updated critique of the global economy and the continued relevance of Marx as a theorist of streamed or virtual capitalism. The first passage is from Arthur Kroker from his book the Will to Technology and the Culture of Nihilism. The next two passages are two excerpts from Debashish articles on techno-capitalism published on SCIY that places the Marx, the new economy and the post-modern subject in more of an Aurobindonian context]

[Savitri coming as an incarnation means she accepting the mortal’s lot, the indignity, the ignominy that is there in the human life. The Immortal has consented to share, the lot, the plight of the suffering soul, all the uncertainties that fill this creature’s daily life. In a way it is as if thus alone could she rise to a yet higher state of immortality...What chance then for techno-capitalism and our ideas of post-human destinies? What chance for the human potential? Perhaps nigh none. The Mortal's Lot became the Immortal's Share
by RY Deshpande on Sat 18 Apr 2009 04:53 AM IST Permanent Link Cosmos]

[Why do human beings often feel such a need to seek support outside themselves in order to give significance to their life? Why must we seek to offload the burden of finding the full meaning of our incarnation onto an outsider, be it a person or an organization? Do we not contain everything within ourselves? The question and its answer? The problem and its solution, like two chicks in the same egg? For a time, it is no doubt easier to leave the matter in someone else’s hands. But this is just putting off the day of reckoning. A time will come when we are alone face to face with ourselves.
Luc Venet on Satprem —Luc Venet]

[For hundreds of years, Dante’s verses have been sung in the poet’s country. And just as love songs prepare boys and girls for love, so the ardent Florentine verses prepared Italian youths for the day of deliverance. From generation to generation, all communed with the soul of the poet and so transformed their slavery into freedom. Zorba the Greek, Kazantzakis, N. (1952, 1981) Translated by Carl Wildman]

[This world's a life-sentence
Nikos Kazantzakis - Zorba the Greek]

[This mire must harbour the orchid and the rose.
Sri Aurobindo's Savitri]

[we are looking for means of persuasion with respect to others so as to form the collective actions we desire. This is one reason Kant, for example, is enamored with the idea of a principle of reason (the categorical imperative) as an ethical ground... universality signifies available to all people. That is, if the categorical imperative is an imperative or rule we all ought to obey, then it must be something available to all of us. To Resume Again– Normativity and Naturalism from Larval Subjects by larvalsubjects]

[Forster's humanistic impulse toward understanding and sympathy may be aptly summed up in the epigraph to his 1910 novel Howards End: "Only connect". Wikipedia]

[Practice does not help. Long-haul airline pilots who are continually flying halfway around the world and back generally feel out of sorts most of the time. Company executives who spend more time in the air than in the office never really adjust. Jet lag comes courtesy of a disruption in your body's internal clocks, a condition known as circadian desynchronisation. Nearly every living creature has a circadian system whose rhythms control the timing of many aspects of biochemistry, physiology and behaviour. What Happens Up There
TOI 18 Apr 2009, 0011 hrs IST, Leon Kreitzman, NYT News Service]

Sublimation like Regression is a variant of Defence mechanism, and so is yoga. "Something available to all of us" not merely on the "principle of reason" but rather irrationally. Given the existential complexities that we humans are immersed and embedded in, it is humbling to recall how yoga galloped even before the orchids appeared. Be it the rose or the Jet lag, it is yoga that is at work, and it would be impudent to set terms for it or sport a sceptic's cap. How it catches whom and why are matters of perpetual mystery. Poetry has all along been igniting sparks of yoga in young hearts; politics too can. [TNM]